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Leftist FascismThursday 30 Jan 2003
author: Steve Brown
The Left's Silence on Islamic Fundamentalism
By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 29, 2003
While Canadian leftists were front and center in demonstrations last week against America's war preparations in the Gulf, shouting their usual hatred against the United States from long-entrenched habit, they have been conspicuously silent about Muslim fundamentalists in their own backyard.
There was no reaction from the Canadian Left, for example, to recent revelations that Canadian citizen Mohammed Mansour Jabarah confessed to being an al-Qaeda terrorist. Jabarah is being held in a detention center in Brooklyn since he voluntarily walked across the Canada-US border into American custody last year at Niagara Falls. He was an important al-Qaeda operative in a plot to blow up Western targets in Singapore in 2001 with as many as seven suicide truck bombs.
Prior to Jabarah’s confession, the Canadian Left only concerned itself with the fact that the terrorist’s rights may have been violated when he crossed the border, as no lawyer was present when he signed a form waiving those rights. As well, since American officials haven't charged Jabarah, Canadian leftists have also been calling for his release and return to Canada, portraying him as an innocent victim unjustly held by a cruel foreign power. And, as usual with the Left, charges of racism were also made. Jabarah's "illegal" treatment, according to some leftists, was due to his being a Muslim and not a white English- or French-Canadian.
But perhaps even more frightening for Canadian society than home-grown Islamic terrorists was an incident at a Toronto mosque over the Christmas holidays. The mosque, patronized by Somali Muslims, sent a message to its members on Christmas Day telling them not to congratulate any non-Muslims on their festivals because it would be like "congratulating a murderer." And any Muslim who wished someone a Merry Christmas "exposes himself to the wrath and anger of Allah."
How lovely.
The mosque director claimed that it was a junior employee who sent out this notice, and that it was done without permission. However, the director was glaringly remiss in not immediately repudiating this hateful message, thus casting doubt on his claim. In fact, reporters who went to the mosque and interviewed patrons discovered that they agreed with the message's contents. Only after receiving negative exposure in the media did the director finally disclaim this piece of hate literature.
Again, as in the Jabarah case, there were no cries of outrage from the Left, the self-appointed watchdog of multicultural tolerance, about this piece of blatant hate-mongering. There were no demands for an investigation and no demonstrations either. And even though a moderate Muslim was quoted as saying this hate-filled outlook towards other religions is becoming widespread in Toronto mosques where, he noted, Wahabbism is taking hold, the Left still remained silent.
Another case of leftist tolerance for what it would normally consider intolerable concerns the latest Toronto school board elections, in which two Muslim candidates ran for trustee positions on anti-homosexual platforms. Again, the Left mounted no shrill campaign against them, a striking occurrence when one considers how close the homosexual issue is to its heart. Normally in such cases, leftists would have howled louder and longer than a back-alley tomcat that just had its testicles stepped on, especially if the candidates were Christian fundamentalists.
One explanation for the Left's silence concerning Islamic fundamentalism is that it simply doesn't know how to react to a minority group that despises its cherished multiculturalism, has no concept of respect or tolerance for others, believes it is superior to everyone and everything, and even includes such people like Jabarah, who would kill his non-Muslim neighbors with no more feeling than squashing an uninteresting specimen of insect.
The Left's naive, irresponsible and dangerously utopian vision for society never considered the possibility that, under multiculturalism, a group with a powerful agenda diametrically opposed to its own would ever establish itself here. In their arrogance and conceit, leftists believed all new immigrants would fit neatly into their societal blueprint and become non-judgmental multiculturalists like themselves.
Another reason for the Left's silence is fear. Muslim fundamentalist intolerance is the rock on which Canada's ship of multiculturalism will eventually founder. Some leftists realize this, but fear to confront it, since to do so would reveal they have been wrong about multiculturalism for the past thirty years – and that it was never realizable in the first place. Like with the Soviet Union, Canadian multiculturalism is another failed leftist experiment. But the Canadian Left would rather stay silent and witness a complete collapse of its dream than admit that yet another one of its destructive, social-engineering theories is a catastrophe.
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Stephen Brown is a journalist based in Toronto. He has an M.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.